Saturday, 25 August 2012

AWESOME SEX (GU blog extracts)

It was nice finally to get some food in the belly – fish,
chips and mushy peas, if it’s of any interest – as your correspondent has felt
a little bleary-eyed today after burning the candle at both ends in a couple of
Nottingham’s hostelries these last two nights.

On Wednesday I partook of a Big Lebowski quiz, annexing
myself to a team comprising four members of a band called Awesome Sex (“a sort
of – ugh – techno-pop”, I presume, but didn’t ask) which has recently splintered
from Hot Japanese Girl. Nice to see new fourpieces using SEO when choosing
their names these days...

Anyway, there were many White Russians imbibed, although mixed
with a little too much ice for Awesome Sex’s taste (‘Jackie’ did not make“a helluva
Caucasian”). It was just a pity that Rob Smyth wasn’t in town, for his Spin
column this week contained, as an epigraph, one of the more gratuitous
Lebowski references you’ll ever see. In the spirit of such gratuitousness,
then, if anyone happens to be an aficionado of the movie and has some free time
when it starts raining shortly (gloom here that Scyld would be contractually
obliged to describe as “Stygian”), I once posed the question: What
can The Big Lebowski teach us about
cricket?It’s just a game, man.

Last night I popped in to see An Audience with Carl Froch,
the Nottingham-born “three-time world super-middleweight champion” being
interviewed by 5Live’s Darren Fletcher before posing kerchingingly for photos
with his fans (they cost £10 each). Overall impression
was of an articulate, magnanimous, down-to-earth figure who spoke with good
humour about his life in and out of the ring and the three-fight plan he has to
bring his career to a close, culminating in an open-air affair at Forest’s City
Ground: “my Vegas, my MadisonSquareGarden”.
One thing he has never done is duck
an opponent (not literally, of course), unlike a couple of the British
“silver-spoon jobs” who went soft with multi-fight TV contracts behind them, and
he said that if he were forced to fight any of the Benn-Eubank-Collins
triumvirate of the division’s Golden Era (this side of the Atlantic, at least),
he would have chosen the former as “he probably would have walked on to me
shots”. Nails.

In the time it has taken me to type out that paragraph, the players have been forced off by a steady drizzle. The above was published by the Guardian on County Cricket - Live! for August 17, day three of Nottinghamshire vs Durham. Report here. Tweet